Substance dualists typically argue that the mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects: size, shape, location, solidity, motion, adherence to the laws of physics, and so on.

Dualists commonly argue for the distinction of mind and matter by employing Leibniz's Law of Identity, according to which two things are identical if, and only if, they simultaneously share exactly the same qualities.

Property dualists agree with the materialists that mental phenomena are dependent upon physical phenomena, since the fomer are (non-physical) attributes of the latter.

Dualisticinteractionism is the ontological position that the furniture of the world consists of two substances: mind and matter.

While the argument for the basis of dualisticinteractionism has been shown to be sound, critics have attacked the thesisâ conceptualisations of dualism and interactionism.

The dualist can reply that the dispositional account of mental phenomena is fundamentally flawed as it is solely based on semantic analysis, and that it does not take into consideration the structural basis of dispositions.

Various kinds of dualism are distinguished based on if and how mind and matter are thought to causally interact.

But there is no cause-effect relation between mind and body; mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche).

One argument for dualism, especially dualisticinteractionism, is that it is a very common sense view.

The other kinds of dualism also accept that mental events and physical events both exist and that they are totally different kinds of events; but unlike interactionism, they deny that mental and physical events causally interact.

According to a theory called parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated, it is said, by God; so that when a mental event such as Sally's decision to walk across the room occurs, then it just so happens that Sally's body heads across the room.

Plato was a dualist; he believed in the existence of both material entities and immaterial ones.

The most explicit statement of dualism, however, is found in the writing of René Descartes, who argued that mind and matter are two separate and distinct sorts of substances, absolutely opposed in their natures, each capable of existing entirely independently of the other.

Thus, a dualist would oppose any theory that identifies mind with the brain, conceived as a physical mechanism.

By contrast, the dualistic interactionist maintains that in addition to physical states causing mental states, mental states also cause physical states.

Dualistic interactionists may be substance or property dualists, but some property dualists are epiphenomenalists.

Given that weakly disembodied survival is logically consistent with the human person continuing to exist in some physical form without a conventional body or brain, weakly disembodied survival does not entail a denial of physicalism.

The classical formulation of interactionism is due to René Descartes, who could not satisfactorily explain how the interaction takes place, apart from the speculation that it occurs in the pineal gland.

This problem led some philosophers to deny that mind and body really interact and to explain appearances to the contrary by appealing to divine intervention to create mental or physical effects for physical or mental causes (see occasionalism) or to a divinely ordained preestablished harmony between the courses of mental and physical events.

Benedict de Spinoza argued for a monistic theory on which mind and body were both attributes of a single underlying substance.

Dualists maintain that the brain and the mind are two distinct beings; monists assert that they are only one thing seen from two different angles, so to speak....

Such a shift from various dualistic, otherworldly beliefs to a monistic, this-world faith, would mean that our planet should no longer be conceived, or treated, as merely a way-station to something better beyond.

In opposition to the dualists, however, Searle suggests that the strict dichotomy between mental and physical properties should be discarded.

By dualistic I mean those which assume that mental and physical processes are distinct in kind and that man is a psychophysical organism in the life of which processes of these two kinds interact.

The dualistic view may be given a metaphysical form by assuming that physical processes are expressions of the nature of a substance we call matter, and that mental or psychical processes are expressions of the nature of a substance we call soul or mind or spirit.

In this form the dualistic view regards physical and psychical processes as distinguishable in terms of the general laws which they seem to obey or manifest: physical processes seem to conform to the laws of strict determination or mechanistic causation; psychical processes conform to the laws of purposive striving, the seeking of goals or ends.

I have proposed the beginnings of a dualistic theory of consciousness, EmergentInteractionism, which is intended to be scientifically useful and has empirical, testable consequences.

The EmergentInteractionism approach to understanding consciousness that I shall outline here tries to take this complexity, these emergent system properties of brain functioning (and, as we shall see, of mind functioning) into account, as well as dealing with the fundamental experience of a dualistic difference between experience and the physical world.

My EmergentInteractionism approach postulates that the mind/life factor cognizes important aspects of the state of the brain by means of clairvoyance, that is, that mind/life uses clairvoyance to 'read" the brain and thus the state of the body and the body's immediate sensory world.

The modern discussion of epiphenomenalism, however, traces back to a 19th century context, in which a dualistic view of mental events was assumed to be correct.

Many contemporary thinkers would respond to the central motivation for epiphenomenalism by denying its dualistic presupposition, i.e., by holding that mental events are identical with physical events, and may therefore have physical effects.

It seems compelling that she would learn something; but as she already has all the physical information there is, what she learns must be some other kind of information, which we may call "phenomenal information".

plato.stanford.edu /entries/epiphenomenalism (7264 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)

Dualists, accordingly, must hold that time itself arose sometime in the course of the evolutionary process.

This was not a problem for the supernaturalistic dualists of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes, because they could simply assume that God created both minds and matter at the origin of the world.

In other words, 'dualism' should be used only as shorthand for 'ontological dualism.'" We should "distinguish between two types of interactionism: dualisticinteractionism and non-dualistic interactionism." In other words, nondualistic interactionism is what is referred to in Anderson, p.

www.newthoughtalliance.org /pages/griffqa.htm (3309 words)

PHILOSOPHY : On Cognition, the Mindbrain, Neurotheology and the Brainmind(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)

The fact that no foundation is sought, brings this theory and practice of knowledge closer to the postmodern approach than modern epistemologies and their singular coding.

Transcendental logic (the core of this critical epistemology) is characterized by a dualistic syntaxis and avoids the foundational monism of reducing the subject to the object (realism, correspondence-theory of truth) or the object to the subject (idealism, consensus-theory of truth).

In a postmodern context, the wish to reduce the variety of complex phenomena and processes to a singular logical primitive is anachronistical.

But it is not a threat to mentalistic psychologies or to a dualistic ontology, for it grants existential status to mental phenomena, even if causal powers are vested in the brain.

It seems that epiphenomenalism calls for a mental species of Q in a way that two-way dualisticinteractionism might not, even if the latter assumes a non-physical species of L. This is consequential to epiphenomenalism because it makes its ultimate appeal to the physical sciences, whereas mentalism does not.

To confront a dualist with the laws of Physics is question-begging.

www.leaderu.com /truth/2truth02.html (4799 words)

D:\ASAWEB~1\PSCF\1984\JASA3-84Burke.htm(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)

This paper analyzes the arguments for dualisticinteractionism given by Karl Popper in The Self and Its Brain and those presented on behalf of the identity theory by D. Armstrong in A Materialist Theory of the Mind.

It is concluded that none of the arguments put forth by the disputants are truly scientific in nature, despite the claims to the contrary, because both positions are compatible with all the evidence cited.

Popper's arguments for a dualistic interpretation and Armstrong's arguments for a physicalistic one are both analyses, not scientific proofs.

Conversely, the physical event of his foot hitting the wall can be the cause of the mental event of his feeling a sharp pain.

In the 17th century René Descartes gave interactionism its classical formulation.

He could give no satisfactory account of how the interaction takes place, however, aside from the speculation that it occurs in the pineal gland deep within the brain.

www.britannica.com /ebc/article?tocId=9042537 (751 words)

DUALISM (PHILOSOPHY OF MIND) FACTS AND INFORMATION(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)

In dualisticinteractionism (also Cartesian_dualism, as it was Descartes' position), arguably the most popular and widespread version, mind events can cause physical events and vice versa.

Mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried_Leibniz's idea of pre-established_harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas_Malebranche).

John_R._Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University_of_California,_Berkeley, has pioneered an approach to mind-body issues that is dualistic in some respects, monist in others.